


Running Still

by luckybarton



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: Ficlet, Pre-Canon, Sleeves (Altered Carbon), United Kingdom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 17:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14454051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckybarton/pseuds/luckybarton
Summary: In the early days, re-sleeving wasn't perfect.





	Running Still

Her name was Rosa, and she was taking the train from St. Pancras when she was on a Greyhound to L.A. and her name was Susan, and it took three taps on the floor and three taps on the glass before she was back to just Rosa, and then things were fine.

Her name was Rosa, and she was five stops from Sheffield. Her grandchildren lived there, and she lived in L.A. with her dogs, and she lived in Newark-on-Trent with nobody at all, but she was coming from London. Her name was Rosa.

Her name was Susan, and she was sure she could remember the hospital. She died twice. The same thing both times, as it happened. Her name was Susan, and her voice was all wrong. In any case, she must have survived; there were echoes, somewhere, of an explanation, of why she, Rosa, was in London. It hadn’t covered the bit about L.A., just the bit about Sheffield and Newark, and she couldn’t remember the details but she could grasp them and she didn’t like how they felt.

The train pulled into Sheffield. The bus pulled into the terminal. Her grandchildren lived here.

Her name was Rosa.

Her name was Susan, and the strangers took her from the station to their car, a yellow hatchback. She was Rosa, and they were Jill and Hannah—“and this is Miriam, and this is Jack, but you won’t have met them”—and she didn’t remember Hannah, not one bit, but she kept her mouth shut. She cooed at the babies.

Jill was on the phone, a flip-phone, and she hadn’t seen one of those in a while. “Something’s wrong with my mother. Something’s wrong with her, and I need a refund.”

The man on the other end said something, and then the phone was flying into a brick wall, and then it was in pieces.

Her name was Rosa, and she’d forgotten to have a body three times already. Forgot like she wasn’t there for a minute, and then she was back, frozen in a position she hadn’t put herself into.

Jill was on the phone again. Hannah’s phone. Hannah had given it to her. There was more waiting, this time, and Hannah steered her way from Jack when she walked over to him, she just wanted to see the baby—

“They’re saying they can convert it to a rental,” Jill said, when Rosa came back. “We still have to pay, but we can send her back—”

—she was Susan, and the sun was too cold and the ground was too green, and she screamed—

—everyone was staring, and someone was approaching her, another woman—

“Sleeve failure, huh?” someone said, outside of her. “Yeah, this happens sometimes. Sometimes the older models even died without stacks in them—can you believe it—gone forever—”

Her name was Rosa, and then she wasn’t.


End file.
